Ready or not, he-e-ere’s Vista Service Pack 1

Right on schedule, Vista Service Pack 1 is showing up for people who use Windows Update.

You’ll be prepared to install SP1 by the time you finish reading today’s special Patch Watch column, but the real question is, will your PC be ready?

936330 Vista SP1 finally hits the streets Back in February, Microsoft product manager Mike Nash announced on the Windows Vista blog that Vista Service Pack 1 would be available via Windows Update around mid March. Sure enough, SP1 was released to Windows Update users on Mar. 18, as described by Nicholas White in a blog post. In April, SP1 will begin downloading to everyone who has Automatic Updates enabled.

The service pack takes anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to download, depending on your connection speed and hardware performance. You may not actually see this service pack, however, when you manually run Windows Update (it’s identified as patch 936330). If not, the reason is probably that your system isn’t ready to install SP1 just yet.

As the posts mentioned above describe, many device drivers need to be updated before Service Pack 1 will install in a seamless manner. Most of these drivers are listed in Knowledge Base article 948343.

I was surprised to discover in my testing that Windows Update was not offering SP1 to one Vista workstation. It turns out that this three-month-old HP workstation had an offending Realtek audio driver. After I installed an updated audio driver, the machine was then offered Vista Service Pack 1.

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